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The real problem with Nate Silver's attack on Paul Krugman

By Dylan Byers

03/27/14 10:07 AM EDT

Nate Silver took a not-so-veiled shot at his former New York Times colleague Paul Krugman on Wednesday, suggesting — through some tongue-in-cheek empirical analysis — that the columnist had taken a more critical attitude to Silver following his move to ESPN.

"Mr. Krugman’s views of FiveThirtyEight have changed since it re-launched March 17 under the auspices of ESPN," Silver wrote. "To be sure, the difference in Mr. Krugman’s views could reflect a decline in quality for FiveThirtyEight. The web site has brought on almost two dozen new employees and contributors. And it has expanded its coverage beyond politics into sports, economics and other areas."

The problems with Silver's attack are manifold: One, it's petty. Two, it's snarky. Three, it's self-centered. Four, it eschews objectivity in favor of personal gripes. Five, it uses data to imply, rather than deduce: Silver suggests Krugman has become a critic because Silver is no longer at the Times. He might pause to wonder if the shift in tone is due, at least in part, to the fact that Silver spent a year hyping up a site that has yet to live up to expectations, and that, in the meantime, he badmouthed columnists like Krugman as "worthless."

But Silver's attack also highlights a much more significant problem with FiveThirtyEight, which is that it desperately needs a news editor.

Silver doesn't care about being first or breaking news — fine, he doesn't need to. But he needs to at least be relevant. So far, Silver's site has achieved relevancy just twice — once with his March Madness picks, which were largely useless, the second time with his Senate predictions, which reportedly scared the bejeezus out of Democrats. But aside from these "events," there is little reason to check in with FiveThirtyEight on a daily basis, unless you're an adoring fan.

To wit: Two days after FiveThirtyEight relaunched, Janet Yellen held her first Federal Open Market Committee meeting, resulting in the broadest sell-off in stocks since the Eurozone crisis. Here was a story that lent itself to the empirical, data-driven analysis Silver champions. Silver could have owned this story throughout the day. For instance, he could have done a data-rich analysis about the interplay between the Fed and financial markets. But the only Yellen-related thing FiveThirtyEight produced that day was a pre-meeting curtain-raiser that was rendered irrelevant once the meeting was under way. Instead, the site led with a story about the University of Dayton's basketball team.

As I write, the current lead on FiveThirtyEight is, "Can Evolution Outrace Climate Change?" The next item is "The Imperfect Pursuit of a Perfect Baseball Forecast." Then there's "Residents of Struggling Cities Opt to Skip Town." Smart? Probably. Relevant to the news cycle? Not really. Several posts are relevant to the news cycle, but many of these are merely contextual — a la what Ezra Klein has planned for Vox — and not exactly pushing the story forward.

Krugman's chief gripe with the new FiveThirtyEight was not unrelated: He wanted more than just data. He wanted context and meaning — the "so what" of journalism. "Tell me something meaningful! Tell me why the data matter!" he wrote at the end of one critical post. To that, I would add, give us data that is relevant to what's going on in the news.

The value of news editors is that, in addition to checking your copy for glaring faults, they are able to gauge the news cycle and think about ways to push big stories forward. If the news of the day is Yellen, what can we do on Yellen? For instance.

Such an editor would also serve the valuable purpose of telling Silver not to engage in petty, snarky attacks on his former colleagues.